I will discuss two research projects at IBM Almaden Research Center that address end-users' creating, customizing, and sharing their business activities and processes.

The Unified Activity Management (UAM) project aims to create a unified representation for work activities, both informal and formal, that supports the aggregation of supporting resources, interaction with formal business process workflows, and the creation and evolution of recurring patterns of activities. For workers to effectively manage their activities, they must be able to customize the organization and user interfaces of those activities. To that end, we are creating a system of web-based activity pages which will allow end-users to create and customize their activity workplaces by themselves.

The Koala project's goal is to streamline interacting with inflexible web-based business applications which poorly support a user's specific needs and tasks. Koala is a system for recording, automating, and sharing business processes performed in a web browser. Through a Mozilla Firefox extension, Koala lets users make a recording as they perform a procedure, play it back automatically in the future, and share it with their co-workers via a wiki. Sharing these procedures will build up in-house expertise and result in an accessible repository of institutional memory.

Bio:
James Lin is a research staff member in human-computer interaction at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose. His research interests include collaborative user interfaces, user interface design tools, and end-user programming. He received an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley and a B.S. in computer science from Caltech.